


Days of Auld Lang Syne

by Aegir



Series: Those who fight Monsters [6]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Funeral story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 09:15:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3244274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aegir/pseuds/Aegir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve says a last farewell to Peggy, and some things come full circle</p>
            </blockquote>





	Days of Auld Lang Syne

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for character death, I suppose, although it's a peaceful death from old age
> 
> This is the last of this series, unless unexpected inspiration strikes.

Peggy Carter died in her sleep on a chilly afternoon in April.

The funeral was small and private. A few years earlier perhaps it would not have been. The files dumped on the internet had exposed how early and thoroughly SHIELD had been penetrated by HYDRA; there had been a lot of anger against SHIELD’s founders, and it was fortunate it had not become public knowledge Peggy was spending her last days in a Washington nursing home. Some of the online vitriol had sounded frighteningly deranged to Steve, although Sam told him internet ‘trolls’ rarely came out from behind their keyboards. All the same he was glad there had been no public notice of Peggy’s death and therefore none of her funeral.

Peggy’s daughter and son seemed surprisingly grateful he was here. Steve had always wondered how they saw him, how strange it must be to meet a still young man, who had known their mother before their father did. There had been a slightly stilted politeness on the few occasions they’d met before. It had been a kind gesture to ask him.

Steve had asked nobody to his own mother’s burial, had stood beside her grave alone, and only realized afterwards that he had hurt other people who had cared for her by trying to keep his grief all to himself. He’d gone back, of course, gone back and found a stone over their graves and his own name on it. That had been stranger than the outsize memorial, because that had felt like it belonged to Brandt’s dancing monkey, and this was unquestionably for Steven Grant Rogers. The stone had been weathering, so he’d had it replaced, with his own details removed.

There was nobody here from what remained of SHIELD, although Steve thought the half-dozen men and women past retirement age might include some former operatives. His relations with Coulson remained frosty at best. Coulson had made it plain he thought Steve had a duty to support SHIELD’s rebuilding. Steve did not hide his cold anger that Fury and Coulson had refused to leave SHIELD in ruins. Something like SHIELD needed to exist, but sometimes the best thing you can do is start over.

Steve had missed so many funerals, while he was encased in the ice. He’d thought of a grave tour sometimes, but had never gone through with it; besides, some of the Howling Commandos had been cremated. He’d been to Bucky’s grave, though it was really just a gravestone at the head of an empty plot. Staring at the carved stone he’d heard the wind of the Alps rushing past, had spent hours staring at a wall when he went back to his apartment.

In a way this funeral seemed to hold all the others he’d never attended. He’d said his goodbyes to Peggy before this. Twice in fact, letting go of might-have-beens, and letting go of his ideal of Peggy, that he carried around in a compass. This though, was not just a last farewell to Peggy, it was his farewell to Dum-Dum and Dernier, Gabe and Monty and Morita, Howard Stark and Colonel Phillips and even, in a way, Dr Erskine. Peggy had been his link, and more than a link, she’d been the one who took the slow road, while he went in a blink from then to now. Seeing the work of time on Peggy had convinced him seventy years had passed far more than seeing Times Square. Knowing Peggy was still in this world had mattered in ways he was only beginning to understand now she was gone.

It still seemed unreal. Steve had slowly learned to think first of Peggy as she was now, not as a young agent he’d formally ask for a dance date someday, but he had not become used to seeing people old enough to be his parents as her children. Not that they looked the way Steve’s parents would have done, if they lived to that age, men and women had aged very differently in the Brooklyn of his youth, and Steve was still adjusting his age estimates for this time. Sometimes he felt caught in perpetual youth, sometimes he felt ancient, as though the years in the ice had laid a weight of age in his bones. Today he felt almost like a ghost at the graveside. He didn’t belong here, among those remembering the life that Peggy had lived, not a young agent known for only a short while or a fading woman in her last days.

_Your life, a zero sum_ , Zola had said. Steve didn’t agree. SHIELD had been worse than a failure, but SHIELD wasn’t Peggy’s true legacy. The real legacy was the people gathered here, from Angela and Graham to the two attendants he recognised from the home where she had spent her last years. If he hadn’t crashed that plane then maybe he and Peggy would have made it as couple, or maybe they wouldn’t. It would have taken more work than his younger self had pictured, building dreams of a bright future in the dirt of war, it would have taken both work and the willingness to accept that in many ways their values were very different. Both of them knew how to work hard, though, and compromise might have come with years. It didn’t matter now, he’d finally accepted that. It didn’t matter, because Steve would never choose to wipe out the life Peggy had had, the happiness she’d given a man Steve hadn’t known, the lives of her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Steve was here to say goodbye to his past; everyone else was here to say goodbye to Peggy Carter and that was what mattered.

He did not linger afterwards, although he exchanged a few words with Peggy’s children. While other mourners returned to their cars Steve wandered away, among the stones, across the well-kept lawns to the line of trees that bounded the cemetery. He’d had a feeling, towards the end of the service, a prickling sense of being watched.

Among the shadows there was a darker shadow, a still shadow, even with the brisk wind blowing through the graves. Steve found his steps slowing as he went closer, hesitating in case the shadow was only a shadow after all. In case this was one more disappointment.

Yet it did not surprise him. Of all the times, all the places, it did not surprise him it was here and now, at the edge of a line of graves and the final closing of a chapter.

He’d thought of so many openings, imagined so many different situations, but now all that came out was a quiet, “Hey.”

There was a pause that stretched, before Bucky said, just as quietly, “Hey, there.”

It wasn’t the first time Steve had seen him since the Potomac, but it was the first time nobody was shooting at them. He looked tired and hollow eyed, but clean and not too gaunt. Wearing a dark jacket and jeans, with the left hand pushed into a pocket, he could have been one of hundreds of thirty-odd guys on the Washington streets.

“How are you doing?”

“OK,” Steve answered. “Really.” He couldn’t read this Bucky. It had already got harder during the war.

“She meant a lot to you.”

“Yes,” Steve said, he would never deny that. “But I’d let go already.” They were facing each other at the edge of the trees still. Across seventy years, and an out of sight fall, and the killing embrace of ice. Across a few feet of damp grass and no time at all. “All the same,” Steve told him, “I wouldn’t say no to some company tonight.”

It seemed like time stretched out and out before Bucky said, “OK.”

Steve felt the faintest trace of a smile etch his mouth, and saw a slight answering quirk of Bucky’s lips, the nearest Steve had seen to a smile on him since 1944. He turned back to the entrance, and Bucky fell quietly into step beside him.

 


End file.
